


omnia mors aequat

by parabolica (orphan_account)



Category: The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-24
Updated: 2014-09-24
Packaged: 2018-02-18 15:36:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2353580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/parabolica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Micheletto is Death, and death means change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	omnia mors aequat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spock/gifts).



Micheletto has never seen an angel.

They exist, so the Church tells him; and as he is, in many ways, a servant of the Church, he should accept its teachings. But though he is loyal—to one master here on earth and to another elsewhere—though he obeys commands without question, he is still curious. He is the Bringer of Death, a reaper of souls; surely if angels existed, he would have seen one by now?

Images of angels surround him within the Vatican. They’re there too in the palaces of cardinals and painted on the walls of even the meanest church. Micheletto studies these representations and compares them to flesh and blood creatures, no less beautiful but much more sinful. Lucrezia, for example—her face radiates purity and innocence, yet he knows the secrets she keeps and the deaths she has caused. And what of her brother? Cesare cannot be an angel, not with his laughing eyes under dishevelled black curls, not with his quick temper and ferocious grudges. Perhaps a cherub, or more precisely a putti—but they are the souls of innocents, and Cesare has not a spotless soul.

These Borgias are earthbound angels, no more real than the beings depicted in paintings and statuary and plasterwork. In time they will grow old and sicken, and when their days run out, Micheletto will be there—a loyal friend from the past, an illusion, a phantasm of memory—and he will ensure their passing.

Over the years he has worn many guises, has Micheletto. He has rejoiced in many names through many cultures and has even been worshipped as a deity on more than one occasion. A god of the dead in the employ of the living representative of a dead god. The irony amuses him.

His current form is pleasing enough. While not as grand or sinister as previous shapes, nevertheless this body makes it easier for him to be about his business. In this form he draws no unwanted attention upon himself: he can flit from the shadows or saunter into a house in broad daylight; he can call upon his victims as a servant, a messenger, a lover, a son, a friend. Humans trust their own kind much more than they trust a blue-skinned demon or a winged youth.

Unless, of course, they believe the winged youth is an angel.

Micheletto doubts the existence of angels. When he kills, no heavenly creature intervenes to prevent him from carrying out his task, no matter how holy the victim. No angels come to guide the loosened soul away; no angels appear from the clouds singing hymns of welcome. No angels come to avenge or judge the dead. There is only him, standing over the discarded corpse.

Death can be sudden or slow, welcomed or feared, but it is never beautiful.

It’s ripe with the stench of voided bowels and rotting flesh and sickly breath. Noisy with prayers and grieving sobs, with frantic bargains offered to God and all His saints, to Satan and the demons of the underworld. It takes many forms: the slick sound of a blade slicing through skin, the gurgling hot gush of blood. The tearing of cloth and the drumming of heels. The creak of the noose, the delicate drip of poison into a cup. The clash of steel and taste of saltpetre, the crack of a musket, the snap of bones, and the thud-thud-thud of a heart taken and squeezed until it is forever silenced.

The act is not beautiful, and yet in another time and another form, Micheletto was beautiful. Reminders of that long-ago past are scattered throughout the papal palaces, courtesy of His Holiness’ passion for discovering and cataloguing the possessions of the ancients. Tucked away in the dead space beneath a staircase is a vase taken from a tomb on the old Via Aurelia: a white-ground lekythos with figures delineated in an elegant hand, the colours rendered in pale shades of red and yellow. A woman sits before a grave stele, a veil drawn over her head. A beautiful youth steps forward, naked and well-formed, a pair of wings sprouting from his back. A second winged youth, no less splendid than the first, approaches from the opposite direction, and in cascading letters are written the names given to them by the Greeks, _Thanatos_ , Death, and _Hypnos_ , Sleep.

Micheletto has no need of a brother to assist him these days. Death does not need the comfort of Sleep in times of war. Neither does he need the beauty with which the Greeks gifted him. Like Janus, man looks inward and outward now, even those who should look up to the heavens for fear of what awaits them below. Beauty is no longer a sign of the good. Better to be misshapen, scarred, deficient in some way.

The world is a place of corruption, far from the ideals of Plato. Rome is a cesspit, the last gasp of an empire that outran itself and went sprawling across the world. Little wonder Death feels at home here, in a city that reanimates itself, like the god of a mystery cult, only to die again.

Micheletto remembers a time before Rome, when the people who inhabited the lands around these hills called him Charun. That form was mighty, striking fear into all those who saw him: blue-skinned, red-bearded, wielding a hammer to free the souls of the newly departed.

It was simpler back then. It was written that a man could not live more than seventy years, or the gods would turn their faces from him. Now there is only one God, and He is distant, more content to let his representative on earth make decisions regarding the lifespan of lesser mortals.

In due course, when Cesare’s time upon this earth runs out, Micheletto will be there for him. He will be there to stroke that noble brow, to caress the sinful, cherubic curls and to kiss the mouth so quick in guile and deep in loyalty. He will take Cesare’s soul into safekeeping, and before he winks out from this plane of existence, Micheletto will lift Charun’s hammer and strike Cesare’s skull, just to make sure he is dead.


End file.
